Forum - View topicINTEREST: Broccoli Lays Down the Law for Dōjin
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Engineering Nerd
 Posts: 898 Location: Southern California |
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Well, does the sale of doujin goods affect the sales and/or image of the copyright-holder company? That's my bottom line
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WANNFH
 Posts: 1697 |
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Oh, here goes the one of the top Comiket doujin contender.
Fujoshi will not be pleased. |
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Nephry
 Posts: 57 |
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That's...huh. Kind of a frustrating choice, given how much dojin there is for UtaPri, and was for Di Gi Charat, Galaxy Angel, and a slew of other Broccoli titles.
The laws are on their side and they have the right to do whatever they want with their work, but...it seems like a poor choice to me. (On the other hand, it IS nice when creators like Hidekaz Himaruya allow fan-made merch  )
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whiskeyii
 Posts: 2245 |
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Does Broccoli actually enforce their policy, or is this just them legally covering their butts?
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lavmintrose
Posts: 90 |
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Why does anyone need to make money off of fanworks, though?
This seems to be a change from a few years ago when I used to frequent anime convention artist alley forums. Everyone there seemed to think that people who try to sell fanart are scammers. I knew plenty of people who wanted fanart banned from artist alleys because fanartists would get all of the attention and profits instead of their original comics that they actually wrote - because no, you do not need a blessing from the gods at some manga publisher to write your own story. To shoppers, an original work is some weird thing they've never heard of so it must be bad, and a fanart of UtaPri is Utapri. So they give their money to the person who took a couple of UtaPri characters and put them into some stock situation ("A gets B a birthday present!" "A has to be B's butler for a week!" "Character-that-survives angsts over character-that-dies, and has a flashback!") and they get paid instead of someone who actually wrote something. But artistic merits aside, simple question: why can't people just post their fanart online and not sell them? Why do you need to sell it? Also think of this: Can you even imagine how much actual creativity there would be if doujin conventions had a rule (like a lot of US cons do) that for every fan work, you have to also have one original work? Then again, a lot of the actual original anime that gets made have plots almost as generic and empty as most doujin, so... (and yes, I have read doujin and I have read fanfics (posted online for free) in English. Most English fanfics tend to be colossally bad, but there are some real gems. Most doujinshi are just... bland. I think I've maybe seen one or two that do anything interesting.) |
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hooliganj
 Posts: 113 Location: Longhorn Central |
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By all accounts, they enforce it. I've heard tales of Broccoli shutting down circles at ComiFest, and that they were the claimant behind the copyright suit that killed the first episode of Osomatsu-san. |
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Hoppy800
 Posts: 3331 |
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Corporate tyranny at work, they could've at least allowed sales at events or even just selected events, but no they still haven't changed one bit. If you are supporting this company, please stop, they do not deserve your business.
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whiskeyii
Posts: 2245 |
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It's been, eh, four or five years since I last went to a big con, but I have been giving a lot of thought to this lately, since you see older/professional comic makers complain about fan art being sold at cons. My major point is this one, which you yourself mentioned. The people who attend cons, anime cons especially, are looking for merch related to their fandom. If attending the con isn't just a yearly tradition for them, then it's likely that an attendee went to a con because something about/someone at the con piqued their interest, whether it's a theme, a guest, or a panel. Those folks aren't in the market for an independent title, though if you're lucky enough to have a fanbase built up, say, on your webcomic's own site, then you might be able to snag a few new buyers if they've at least heard of your work. I applaud folks for making and selling their own stuff, but unless a con has a policy in place to equalize fan and original art, cons just don't really have the clientele for it. As for Broccoli itself, are they really such a small company that they feel the need to protect their IPs by shutting down fan works? It's not like they can collect on the profits of doujins or things like that. |
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WANNFH
Posts: 1697 |
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Broccoli isn't really the small company in their business market - that guys bigger than the Visual Arts (Key brand holder), and more bigger than known visual novel publishers like Nitro+, despite making only otome games. So there is, as said before, is really a simple pull of corporate tyranny. |
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GATSU
Posts: 15304 |
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Engineering Nerd: Ok, since the cat's finally been brought out of the bag, here's the dirty secret of Japanese game companies. They steal characters and backgrounds of anime and manga-oftentimes sending in spies to workplaces to take pics of 'reference photos'-and incorporate those pics into the games. Plus, to help cover their tracks, they hire doujin artists to redraw the pics. Been going on since the bubble, and while it generally doesn't hurt domestic sales, it does cut into their bottom line overseas-since the game companies often beat the publishers to the punch. And, of course, this contributes to the devaluation of the publishers, and, gradually, the work of the lower-level staff. Think of it as the illegal equivalent of what Silicon Valley's done to our jobs. The average pirate, scanlator or torrenter is small potatoes, compared to these bastards. Anyway, basically, what this means is that if you've played a Japanese video game which is not a tie-in, there's a good chance it's a bootleg of someone's anime or manga. And people like Ken Fapamatsu are bitching about TPP precisely because it would curtail this behavior.
Edit: I should also add that it's the real reason Hideo Kojima got fired. He was a little too honest about his 'influences', and Konami didn't: A) Want to compete with other media that he name-dropped and B) Get sued, in case he mentioned the wrong thing on Twitter. Furthermore, if a Japanese game company doesn't want to release a product here, it most likely means they're worried about getting sued over something they ripped off, too. Edit 2: Speaking of beating to the punch, here's a good example. Pic of Skull Face from MGS 5. And here's a pic of Alabaster, a manga which DMP recently tried and succeeded to Kickstart around the same time. Edit 3: Oh, and in case you've been burned by one too many shitty games from these companies, they know about it, because they do it on purpose. When they learned you were stupid enough to buy that POS E.T. game from Atari, they decided to apply that complacency to baiting-and-switching you. And judging by the fact that many gamers were willing to still pay eBay prices for dirty carts buried in the desert, instead of just, I dunno, emulating it, these companies are going to continue the practice of duping the rest of you, too. Last edited by GATSU on Sat Jan 09, 2016 9:47 pm; edited 6 times in total |
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CrowLia
 Posts: 5504 Location: Mexico |
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As much as I love UtaPri, I hope the Japanese fandom starts boycotting it and all Broccoli properties, given this absolute tyranny. This is literally the most ungrateful and stupidly mean and overzealous thing to do to your fandom, especially a fandom that is as active as UtaPri. Are they not even aware of who were buying those dozens of thousands of UtaPri BDs? I am particularly infuriated by this part:
They're implicitly condemning all slash content regardless of whether it makes profit or not, which, hello, makes up for a huge part of the fanwork. This is just frustratingly stupid and pathetic. It's not even greedy because they're literally not losing any profit from doujinshis. They're just being not-so-nice-people because they can. Seriously fudge them |
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whiskeyii
Posts: 2245 |
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Agree entirely with your post. The only bit that confuses me is the one I quoted. Wouldn't selling doujin only impact Broccoli as a company if Broccoli themselves put out manga, or just more merch in general? You can't exactly lose profit over something you're not selling, and as far as I can tell, there's not a whole lot of UtaPri merch out there that I can find (though using a US-based Google system might be hindering me there; can't really tell). |
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Hoppy800
Posts: 3331 |
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Concepts too, if you heard the story behind Giga and Colorful Kiss and how similar it is to Sister Princess in concept. |
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Stuart Smith
 Posts: 1298 |
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Well, I'm glad I'm not a fan of any of Broccoli's current works, but this seems like a slap in the face to fujoshi especially. Alienating the UtaPri fandom like that seems like a very odd move on their part. I wonder what their logic is.
Because it's an actual job for those people. The reason Japan has so much high quality art is because it's an actual career opportunity, not just in money making, but it's a good way to get noticed and a job in the actual industry if you want one. When you have tons of artists who can make over a million yen per picture set or doujinshi they make, it's easy to see why artists flock to producing fan work as a career. It rewards and nourishes those individuals who have talent. Speaking as a collector, I love collecting doujinshi for my favorite series. I have no problem paying for fanart, as long as it's good. The nice thing about CG sets is they're sold on disks with actual cases. You can buy digital files from a lot of adult websites if you want, but as a collector it's nice to have the physical set. If it was distributed for free, obviously physical media would be a loss because they have production costs, so as a collector paying for fan work works out for us. -Stuart Smith |
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luisedgarf
Posts: 656 Location: Guadalajara, Mexico |
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More than they want to modify their law to please their Great Senpai, the U.S., right? |
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